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This is a list of the stuff I’ve installed on my Mac mini server that I use at work.

RAID setup

Ukelele : I use Ukelele to configure my french Logitech keyboard. Actually I don’t need to use Ukelele but just to install the appropriate keyboard layout and icon file distributed with Ukelele in my /System/Library/Keyboard Layouts.

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This is the time of the year when the web goes to Paris for two days of IRL networking. This year we are back at Les Docks on the outskirts of Paris and I think I like this place better (hoping they’ll have the fantastic food like three years ago and not the Danone stuff).

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Marissa Mayer, Vice President, Search Products and User Experience, from Google is on stage talking about Google Goggles (on Android for now) that lets you start a search with a picture you take by using image recognition (shape, color, OCR). Music and video will be next.

Next she talks about her vision of news : hyper-personalized news stream. The unit of news is no longer a whole newspaper but a story. A tool has to be built that gets the news we want and need and that can be consumed on multiple platforms.

She uses Twitter search to get information on snow conditions in ski resorts ! She believes social search will be very important in the future. PageRank can’t be used in realtime search so they are working on other mechanism that will rely on figuring out what are the “magic updates”.

Google Wave has a problem of critical mass.

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Ryan Sarver, director of platform from Twitter, announces the Twitter firehose for everyone at LeWeb. No details yet but they are working on it for the start of 2010. Twitter is also launching a website for developers in a few week. He also talked about OAuth API that will have 10x rate limit increase and access from browser-less apps. We will probably see some very cool new apps in 2010 now that Twitter data is increasingly easier to get access too.

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Ethan Beard, director of Facebook Developer Network, tells us at LeWeb how Facebook is about identity through your social graph. Facebook connect is the easiest way to logon to a website and he just announced that developers will have access to Facebook’s users’ email now. I believe this is one less reason not to use it and 350 million users is an impressive number. Facebook connect is not only a sign-on method for websites but is also on many devices like the iPhone and the Xbox. It doesn’t look good for OpenID and other single sign-on methods.

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Jack Dorsey from Twitter fame demonstrates the Square mobile payment system. After going through the demo effect (problem reading the card, wifi too slow) he showed us a very interesting system. The main selling point is anybody can take payment without setting up a merchant account. Think PayPal for real life. Not sure it will work in Europe where we don’t use the magnetic stripes so they will have to build a smartcard reader.

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Just arrived at LeWeb’09 ! Nice badges with our Twitter handle on them. Speaking of Twitter it when down a few minutes ago, maybe because we have a twitter stream up on the screen on stage ? Heating is on and wifi seems good so far, and the venue is packed, very impressive. 2300 participants and 50 countries !

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Just upgraded my WordPress install and decided to use the Thesis theme. It is a really a very powerful and highly customizable theme with great CSS support. My blog should be evolving design-wise in the next few days. Stay tuned !

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I have a bunch of mail in an old Gmail account and today I decided to merge it into my Google Apps account that I now use. Previous methods I was using for moving mail was through IMAP but after looking around I found out Google’s Email Uploader. Google Email Uploader uploads mail to Google Apps from your email client (Outlook, Outlook Express or Thunderbird). To trick it into moving mail from Gmail I setup my Gmail account to accept IMAP connections and used Outlook to connect to it.

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Waking up wasn’t easy this morning ; the MySpace party was a blast ! Today was alot better than yesterday, food and some heating, but most important alot of incredible speakers. We had Eric Besson and Christine Lagarde, both french ministers, to tell us that the french governement has never been so involved in the Internet scene. Both were interesting, but Mrs. Lagarde english blew me away (in Loïc too). Wish all our politicians were that fluent !

The panel on open platforms with Facebook, Google, Microsoft and MySpace was great. Very talented people talking of things that should help us manage our digital ID in the near future. Chris Anderson curator of TED was also a brilliant speaker and his views on the global IQ of the Internet were very interesting. Dr. Brian Cox took us on a trip through our universe and it was very captivating.

After lunch we saw the three finalist of the startup competitiion and the winner (htttp://www.viewdle.com) was fascinating. They demoed their video search site and it was really awesome to see in action. It searches faces and text and shows you just the part you are looking for !

I attended a Facebook workshop and learned a few things in developping an app for Facebook and found a french company specializing in Facebook app developpement, could be handy some day.

The show by Wine Library TV.com host Gary Vaynerchuk was just big huge fun… as was the closing panel with the Gillmor Gang. And incredibly the room was packed right up to the end !

Now it’s time to eat and get ready for the closing TechCrunch party tonight, but I’ll do what it takes to be here next year for sure ! Thank you Géraldine and Loïc !

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For the first day two speakers stood out : Helen Fisher and Paulo Coehlo.

Helen presented her research on what happens in our brain when we fall in love and what parts are active in certain situations. She also showed how she manages to put people in 4 different types and told us she has eleborated a questionnaire that helps her very precisely categorized a person in through these 4 temperaments.

Paulo told us that the most important thing for him was to have readers and therefore he isn’t opposed to free downloading of his works. He even argues that it helps him sell more of his work. He told us that people never comment on downloaded books but he gets thousands of emails concerning his “physical” books.

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Can’t believe how cold it is here, everybody is freezing and sneezing. After last year’s most excellent food this year’s is a real shame. I can’t judge the quality since I didn’t get any, there just wasn’t enough ! Maybe the love theme is to blame, as they say in french : “vivre d’amour et d’eau fraiche”…

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Worst english accent ever heard (worst than Loïc’s) but very, very entertaining and interesting !

The big image – mutation : every project must be part of the big image. Mutation is better than revolution. We are a movement. We need to be a good mutant. We need to understand, be intelligent. We must look forward, not down (lazy, not thinking), not up (turn completely to God). The higher the horizon, the higher the intelligence.

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I’m at the Le Web 3 conference here in Parissince this morning and so far I’m liking it ! First the bad part : flaky wifi in the main conference room. It started with an interesting discussion on identity and privacy and here is what I caught (while fighting wifi connection problems !).

Identification helps users behave. Theft of identity can be a problem and therefore one solution can not be the solution. A centralized government run system is a bad idea. History of identity is important – old users behave well.

No value of a false identity on Facebook. The relations are based on real-world relations. People have normal social interactions on Facebook. You are liable online but it is easier to go after the hosting company. If a company doesn’t disclose the identity of a user they become liable.

Users should be in control of their data – they should be able to opt-in and opt-out easily. Advertisement is going to be more social, more integrated with the medium. Advertisement shouldn’t be a distraction. You can’t share personal identifiable information across websites.

The web is not just a publication space – it is also a discussion space. But publishing is coming to the user generated space. The social web has increased the value of the web because you know the people. The content is getting better.

Next we had Evan Williams of Twitter fame who could measure the Twitter effect for real as the room is full of twitterers from everywhere. A nice speech on the effects of simplicity in design. Then Kevin Rose of Digg was interviewed by Sarah Lacy and the guy is cool for good. Hans Roling was next with a very cool statistical software that plays world data like a movie. Very powerful stuff to learn what the world is doing. He hinted it would be on Google very soon, teachers (and kids !) will love it.

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No IMAP access at Gmail was the only reason I had not switched all my mail to Google. As much as I like GMail I want to be able to choose my mail client depending on device, location, etc. IMAP native clients on phones are still the best way to read mail IMHO on a cellphone. IMAP means I can also easily synchronize my mail to a desktop computer for backup purposes. I’ll probably end up using only Gmail’s web interface on desktop computers but having choice is good !